The Missing Manuscript of Jane Austen (7 page)

There were electric lights throughout, but we used our flashlights to look in the dark corners. Anthony came upon all sorts of mementos from his childhood that unexpectedly stirred up fond memories. We found old furniture, family photos, boxes of toys, children’s books, dusty Christmas decorations, discarded appliances, obsolete electronics, ancient camera equipment, an old telescope, bolts of fabric, and trunks of lovely vintage clothing and hats…but no bricked-up hiding places, and nothing resembling a manuscript.

“Bollocks,” Anthony said at last, sitting down on one of the trunks.

“It was always a long shot,” I admitted, “but I enjoyed looking. You have a wealth of wonderful family history here.”

“I had no idea.”

As we traipsed back downstairs, he looked at his watch. “It’s two o’clock. No wonder I’m starving. Let’s have lunch. I dashed out
early this morning and picked up some groceries—I’m sure I can whip up a couple of fairly edible sandwiches.”

I figured it was time to call it quits. “Thanks, but you don’t have to feed me again—I’ve already taken up most of your day. Don’t you need to get back to London tonight?”

“No, I’ve taken tomorrow off. I have a lot to do around here before I go home—but to tell you the truth, I’ve lost interest in it. How long were you planning to stay in the area?”

“I need to go back to London tomorrow, too.”

“Well then, we’re on the same timetable. We have to eat—we might as well do so together. And I think a ham sandwich on a bakery bun is the least I can do for the woman who proved that a world-famous authoress once spent the night at my childhood home.”

I laughed. “All right, a ham sandwich it is.”

We retreated to the kitchen, which was large, serviceable, and relatively clean although outmoded. “As you can see, it hasn’t been updated in sixty years,” Anthony said, as if in apology, “but everything still works.”

I loved the look of the old cabinets, stove, and other appliances, and told him so. “I think it’s quaint, and fits with the mood of the house. I’d hate to see it modernized.”

“Well, that’s the first thing the new owners will do, I’m sure—rip all this out and start over.”

“Do you already have an offer?”

“No, but I listed it for sale yesterday, and I have my fingers crossed that something will come through soon.”

The thought of his selling Greenbriar depressed me, so I changed the subject. We made lunch together, and sitting at the kitchen table, we chatted about this and that, comparing notes on our various travels, and on movies we liked. He loved the same mysteries, thrillers, and action films that I did, as well as many
of the historical dramas and romantic comedies that I had watched many times. Yet somehow, he’d never seen a Jane Austen film—he admitted that he’d intentionally avoided them—and I told him he was really missing out.

Eventually, the conversation circled back to the quest at hand.

“I still can’t get over the fact that we found Jane Austen’s name in the family guest ledger,” Anthony said as he sipped his Coke.

“If you let it be known, that little tidbit of information will be added to every Austen biography—and I wouldn’t be surprised if the house
is
added to all those bus tours from London and Hampshire.”

He grinned. “You’re right—I hadn’t thought of that. But the ledger isn’t the finish line. I’m not done searching for the manuscript.”

“You’re not?” I said, surprised.

“I’m determined to find the thing. Aren’t you?”

“Well, yes. But—”

“Can you imagine if I sold the house, and the new owner was to come upon the manuscript someday? I’d want to shoot myself.”

I laughed. “You know
I’m
game. But where else should we look? We don’t have a thing to go on.”

“True. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

We both lapsed into thought as we finished eating. All at once, an idea occurred to me. “If the manuscript’s in this house, I think I might know where it is.”

“Where?”

“In the library.”

“Why?”

“You said you used to play detective in every room in the house except that one.”

“So?”

“So—it’s unexplored territory.”

“We spent three hours this morning looking through the library.”

“We just looked at the
books
—and not all of them, not even close. It’s a huge room. I can’t explain it, but I have a feeling the manuscript is somewhere in that room. It’s like when I bought that book of poetry the other day—something about it called out to me. I just knew I was supposed to buy it.”

“Well, it’s as good an idea as any I’ve come up with.”

We cleaned up from lunch and returned to the library. My eyes were drawn to the series of cabinets with carved-oak doors that were built in beneath many of the bookcases.

“What’s in those cupboards?” I asked.

Anthony admitted that he’d never looked inside them in his life.

We opened the first set of doors and found a cabinetful of old maps, covering not just Devon and the British Isles, but many countries in Europe and places farther afield including Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Many of them dated back to the 1800s and were truly remarkable, with fine engraving, beautiful hand coloring, and decorative floral or ivy borders. Recognizing their value, we carefully set them aside.

“Is it okay to be touching these?” Anthony asked. “I read somewhere that you’re supposed to wear latex gloves when reviewing old documents.”

“I never wear gloves to handle old books and paper—none of the conservators that I know do, either. We sometimes use cotton gloves when handling metal or photographs, to avoid
leaving fingerprints—but they don’t fit well, and they’re clumsy. As long as your hands are clean, and you work gently, the oils on your fingers don’t do all that much damage to paper. You’d do far more mechanical damage by fumbling with latex gloves.”

The second and third cupboards contained ancient film canisters from what we guessed to be home movies, and more old photograph albums. One of the albums was from Anthony’s childhood. We glanced through it, smiling at his baby pictures and shots of his parents and himself as a boy. These seemed to stir up memories, both good and bad. At the back of the album, he came upon a handful of letters and dozens of colorful greeting cards he said he’d handmade as a child.

“All the birthday and Father’s Day cards I made for him over the years,” Anthony murmured in quiet surprise. “And my letters…I had no idea he kept them.” Frowning, he put them back in the album and moved on.

The fourth cabinet was stuffed with old file folders full of documents. It was the closest thing we’d seen to a manuscript, and our hopes rose.

“Some of these go back a long time,” Anthony said, awestruck, as we started looking through them. “Look, here’s one that’s a hundred years old.”

We spent half an hour sitting on the floor, carefully sifting through the old documents, and separating out the ones that looked the most valuable. They included hunting licenses, deeds, old letters, and even ancient, architectural records for the house—but no manuscripts.

“These are fascinating,” I said. “Many are worthy of being in a museum.”

Anthony agreed. “Still—they’re hardly what we were looking for.”

We sat in disappointed silence for a moment. Just then, my
cell phone rang. I pulled it from my pocket. There was a text message from Stephen. We had the following brief text conversation:

I texted a similar, brief update to Laurel Ann, then put my phone away.

From our seats on the floor, Anthony glanced at the portraits of Lawrence and Alice Whitaker, the first master and mistress of Greenbriar. “If only paintings could speak. I’d swear they know something.”

The couple gazed down at us as if in possession of some great secret. “Wait,” I said. “Didn’t you say Lawrence Whitaker built this library in his wife’s memory?”

“So I was told.”

“If he loved her that much, he must have kept some precious mementos to remember her by. Do you have anything like that? Her jewels, or maybe love letters?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Maybe he hid them for safekeeping behind a secret panel.”

“A secret panel?” He sounded both amused and skeptical.

“Why not?” I returned lightly. “Doesn’t every old English manor house have a secret panel?”

“In all my searching as a child, I never discovered one.” Anthony paused, his eyes widening with sudden interest. “But then, I never searched
this
room, did I?”

We leapt to our feet. The floor-to-ceiling bookcases were all made of oak, there were large wooden pillars at each corner of the room, and practically every surface that wasn’t a window was paneled.

“You start at that end,” he said, “and I’ll begin here.”

As I moved through the room, looking for any sign of a line or crack that might indicate a hidden door, pressing here, there, and everywhere to see if a panel might reveal itself and spring open, I felt a bit ridiculous—but at the same time, I couldn’t help smiling. It truly felt like a treasure hunt, and I knew the prize, if there was one, would be beyond our imaginings.

We studied every pillar, post, and panel. We checked out every inch of the mantelpiece. We looked behind all the pictures on the walls. Nothing.

I sighed and moved to the couch, where I sank down wearily.

Anthony dropped into a chair, equally discouraged. “If Jane Austen really did lose or misplace a manuscript here, either someone found it and took it to God knows where, or they tossed it ages ago, having no idea what it was.”

“I’m sorry to have wasted your time.”

“It wasn’t a complete waste. It was fun.” He smiled at me, a look that openly revealed how much he’d enjoyed these moments of camaraderie we’d shared.

I couldn’t deny that I returned the sentiment in kind. The expression on his face was so captivating, it made my heart beat a little faster. It was like we were coconspirators in a quest for a precious Austen relic. “It
has
been fun. It was lovely to think, for a little while at least, that we
might
actually find something.”

“And in the process, look how many interesting things we’ve
come across.” He gestured toward the piles of stuff we’d emptied from the cupboards, most of which were still strewn across the floor.

I stared at the empty cupboards. A sudden prickle ran up my spine. “Anthony: did you check the back of any of those cabinets?”

“The back?”

“Yes. The back.”

We exchanged a look. In unison, we darted to the last cupboard we’d searched through—the one that had held all the old documents—and fell to our knees. I half crawled inside, then felt all along the smooth wooden surface of the rear wall to see if there was evidence of an embedded door. I couldn’t find any.

“Press on it,” Anthony said.

I laid my palm flat against the back wall and pressed. Still nothing.

“Let me try.”

Anthony wedged himself into the small, confined space beside me, until our faces were inches apart, and his lean, muscled arm and the length of his torso were pressed against mine. My heart began pumping loudly in my ears—an effect, I told myself, that had nothing to do with his proximity but was due entirely to the excitement of the search and the anticipation of what we might find.

“I think I feel a crack,” Anthony said. He pressed hard on the far right side of the back wall.

Suddenly, as if by magic, a previously invisible door in the rear wall of the cupboard began to swing open toward us, revealing a recessed alcove. We gasped in astonishment as we backed away.

“Dear God in Heaven,” Anthony said.

Within the hidden alcove lay two wooden boxes. Anthony took
them out and set them on the carpet before us. The first box looked like a jewelry case. It was about the size and height of a fat, hardcover book, was veneered in figured rosewood with brass embellishments, and styled in the form of a small sarcophagus with a hinged lid.

The second box was much larger—about the size of a man’s shoe box—and was intricately inlaid on all sides with a marquetry design made up of different colors of polished wood.

I was nearly paralyzed with excitement. “They’re beautiful. I wonder how long they’ve been in there.”

“A long time, I’d wager.”

Neither box appeared to have a keyhole or other visible lock, but the rosewood box had a little brass latch. Anthony gently lifted the lid. The inside was lined in royal blue velvet that appeared extremely old although it was in excellent shape. Nestled inside was a small, hand-painted cameo portrait of a young woman who looked like Alice Whitaker, along with a lock of hair, and a stunning ruby necklace and earrings.

I gasped. “It’s Alice! And the jewels she’s wearing in the portrait!”

“They’re incredible,” Anthony said, as we studied the rubies.

We paused and exchanged a glance, wordlessly sharing the same thought.
What was in the other box?

I picked it up. It was completely sealed shut, with no visible opening. “How on earth do you open it?”

“I bet I can figure it out.” Anthony began working at the inlaid wooden design meticulously with his fingertips. “I think it’s a puzzle box. I had several of these when I was a boy.”

I watched in suspense, mystified, as he continued to press on the sides of the box, turning and twisting it this way and that, until, to my surprise, a series of narrow wooden strips that
had been hidden by the design began to materialize and slide left and right.

To my amazement, miraculously, the lid suddenly loosened and slid all the way open, revealing its hidden cargo:

A stack of small paper booklets.

Dozens and dozens of them.

Booklets made of ordinary sheets of white writing paper, folded in half, and hand-stitched along the spine. Booklets in remarkably pristine condition, all covered in a small, neat handwriting that I instantly recognized.